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I decided to go back and redo my breakout of David Hogg's "Leaders We Deserve" PAC filing with the FEC for the 2023-2024 election cycle. Here's what it looks like visually. www.fec.gov/data/committ...

They raised ~$11.9 million last cycle and "disbursed" just under $11.0 million, although the detailed breakout adds up to around $11.76 million; I'm not sure what accounts for the ~$760K discrepancy. 1/

Regardless, they actually donated around $3.2 million to various Democratic candidates, Dem Party committees & other PACs (including themselves...$116,000 went to "Leaders We Deserve Florida"). A whopping $1.23M of it went to a single legislative candidate in Texas.

They spent ~$450,000 on direct mail, though I don't know if that was to help elect candidates or marketing for themselves. They spent ~$1.7 million on "digital ads"...again, I don't know if those are ads for candidates or for themselves.

They spent $128,000 on travel (airfare, hotels, trains, gas, car rental, Lyft/Uber, etc). $166,000 to rent office space (they only list 5 employees). $184,000 in legal fees (lawyers can be expensive I know).

Speaking of those 5 employees, the payroll for them was $490,000 (this was for 18 months FWIW).

People like to shit on consultants and it is warranted at times but they are often necessary, particularly if you don’t know how to do something or simply don’t have the bandwidth. I would not want to chance screwing up an FEC filing so it makes sense to pay for someone knows what they are doing.

Disclosure: I worked in the consulting world, including at one firm who at least did their site. (I didn’t work on it as it was after I left.)

Digital has retainers, ad commissions, or things like building a website. Comms consultants may be a firm that has relationships with reporters and pitch on your behalf, track media coverage, draft materials. It’s very time consuming.